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One's personality is both a composition and reflection, but if I have to choose one of them, I will choose reflection as the "self" is more important to me than "me". One's composition may change, walking across the cultural landscapes and climbing the social ladder but one's self is tied to one's reflections. The fun part is that reflections are not bound to "Time-Space" barriers ( it is not time-space) and respective mental constructs, which have grown so thick over ages, that they had reduced the image of humans to Sisyphus, rolling different sizes of boulders on hills of different heights.… As the name of this Blog indicates, knols are my perspectives on topics of interests, sweet/bitter experiences or just doodling :)

Saturday, December 8, 2012

The 5th Dimension

Although our senses are familiar with 4 dimensions, 3-D space and Time as fourth dimension, there is one more dimension (metaphorically) that we sense but have not become efficient to communicate well, as we do in case of the Space-Time and that is; the distance between humans. While other 4 dimensions need an outward looking approach to make a good sense, the 5th dimension requires an inward looking approach to make a good sense of it. In Sufi world, it was evolved into a well developed body of knowledge but unfortunately, this tradition is dying fast. In our time, people take great pride for their ability in critical thinking and analyzing past or possible future outcomes by hypothesizing/creating All Possible Scenarios based on observable data but it takes me with great surprise that, for the last few years that I have read tens of books and articles on the so called psychological findings, they have proved to me, too wee in their practicality and ability to guide in how to become more efficient in sensing the 5th dimension. When I compare them with manuals of Sufis that are usually only few sentences on different aspects of how to self-control and treat others, the distinctions become more evident and it tells me that just understanding, how humans have evolved and how their brains works do not make a body of knowledge useful unless, it gets engineered into some sort of practical manuals. Take the Sufi manual of speech for example, that is commonly known as four gates of speech;

"Before you speak, make sure your words pass through these four gates;

1. Are these words true? if it passes this criteria then ask,

2. Are they necessary? if it passes this gate then ask,

3. Are they beneficial? if it passes through this one also then ask,

4. Are they kind?

If a speech passes all these four gates then definitely, those words will make people around more open-minded in accepting others as him/her and see through curtains that humans have constructed over ages to think of themselves above the average. The 5th dimensional is a blurred area mainly because of strong susceptibility of humans to "above average effect" or Illusory Superiority that get even worst across human groups. Here is another practical manual, that have turned studies in how to do things;